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Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

Well v.reddit isn't really working for them e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/fqbcat/i... or https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/8oa1ag/why_ar... ... what I wonder if whether that's a lack of engineering effort by reddit or more missing peering agreements or both?

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It's mind-boggling. I can easily view videos on desktop or mobile hosted on youtube, streamable, clippuser, imgur, gfycat. All load and play really quickly even on an old, crummy phone. Meanwhile v.reddit.com is slow as hell, can't scrub, controls don't work in full-screen. And it's been that way for years with no improvement.

You know, v.reddit has never worked for me but I chalked it up to noscript/firefox/old-reddit idiosyncrasies. Crazy that its actually a global issue and has been for over a year. I'd really like to know the behind-the-scenes on this one.

> v.reddit has never worked for me but I chalked it up to noscript/firefox/old-reddit idiosyncrasies.

same for me

Another obligatory "same here."

Even disabling it doesn't get it to work for some reason unless I clear all my history related to it or something.

works fine for me with firefox + old reddit + RES. breaking on noscript is probably expected because almost all web video players are js based. You might be able to mitigate that by navigating to the video file directly, eg. https://v.redd.it/1m6ye7yto4561 -> https://v.redd.it/1m6ye7yto4561/DASH_1080.mp4

I don’t know why v.reddit doesn’t work, all I know is that if I get the hls address and stick it in a video tag, it’s pretty reliable.

This likely means that they’re doing something so badly that they break something that already works. Good job.

Reddit introduced image/video hosting to fix the problem of all Reddit submissions eventually linking to content that 404ed.

That it’s not the best experience doesn’t completely damn it. A slowly loading video is better than a 404ing video in Reddit’s trove of aging but still relevant topics.

Also, users complaining that it’s not as fast as Youtube (your evidence) doesn’t mean it’s “not working out for Reddit.” It has perf/UX issues but it’s a huge boon for the users that click in to a topic with a video that would have otherwise 404ed.

Hmm, Reddit seems purpose-built for very recent and fresh discussions compared to a forum, where a thread could be active for years and years. I'm not sure I'm buying the 404 thing.

"not working"? It usually works fine for me. The only thing I noticed is that during peak hours the videos would be low quality or would buffer.

The videos work fine for me in the mobile app but almost never work right on the desktop Reddit. I’m still using the old layout, so maybe the issue Is fixed on the slow new design.

The videos usually just don’t start playing. I have to tap a second or two into the video, then toggle play/pause a few times.

Personally I find their video player annoying from a UX perspective (although I only use browser, mostly via old.reddit) and the performance erratic (from Switzerland). I'm guessing peering is a factor for example this post https://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/comments/drf7na/vreddit... ... that means for some people v.reddit will be great and for others awful, depending where you are in the world.

Any problems you see are likely on the video players side, not the CDN/hosting side. If you like working on this stuff, there's a job open!

https://boards.greenhouse.io/reddit/jobs/2168814

v.redd.it (which is just a domain for hosting their own videos) works fine on the reddit app and reddit.com (even old.reddit.com + RES works fine for me).

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